Everlasting Melody
by Clarinetist
Summary: AU fic, Chapter 2 up! "He had almost killed the love of her life, although he was a monster. And that was something that he never wanted to remember."
1. Chapter 1

**A/N: Konnichiwa minna-san! I'm back! I update randomly, actually, so that wouldn't be an accurate statement…but whatever. Enjoy!**

**Disclaimer: Kishimoto-sama owns Naruto, and if I'm not mistaken, he's Japanese. I, however, am Russian, Italian, and Irish, so I quite honestly do not believe I own Naruto in any possible way and neither should you.**

0o0o0

A petite kunoichi sang a soft, lilting lullaby to the cradle rocking gently by her knee. It was an older song, one of the traditional tunes that her mother had sung to her when she was a babe, and that she herself, at the time only age six, had sung to her younger sister after their mother had passed away. The melody drifted around the small hovel, sweetening the air with its untainted harmony. The wind whistling through the trees in the meager wood added to the calming refrain that had become the heart and soul of the voice bringing it into existence. It was a song of joy, of love, and most of all, a song of purity, to symbolize the new spring rains, the flowers opening their petals to the hummingbirds, and the mewling of infant animals beseeching their parents for food.

As the day wore on, the cradle stopped rocking, the wind stopped blowing, and the animals stopped chattering their daily prattle, and all that was left was the haunting, beautiful hum that the ballad had reduced to. The lady stood up and stretched her sore muscles, exhausted from her days work. She picked up the sleeping newborn from her crib and carried her outside into the cool night's embrace. She began a different song, this one speaking of battles, war, and blood, covering the child's ears so the young one need not hear the horrors she spoke of, and waited.

Soon after the song was completed, a large feline walked out of the forest surrounding the cottage, its auburn eyes a sharp contrast with its ebony coat. The kunoichi, small as she was, had to stand on the tips of her toes to pet its head, and she placed the baby on its back with a reverence shown to few. She whispered one word before she sent the panther on its way to the distant place she was told he, the father of the miracle that had become her life, her child, was living.

"Kou."

With a snarl, the pitch-colored cat ran in the direction of the babbling brooks and wild forest-jungles that dotted the Land of Fire. The maniacal grin that graced the panther's face was frightening, but the babe on its back slept as though nothing had occurred between its mother and the strange animal.

Standing back near the first tree, the woman closed her eyes, took a deep breath, and began another song, one speaking of love, warmth, a home to come back to after travel, and wishes to return to one's birthplace. It was a song of homecoming.

Out of the small house she had stood in only moments before strode a burly man holding a kunai, with a look that seemed to say he was prepared to kill anyone who stood in his way. He took one glance at the raven-haired woman standing a mere few feet from him, came up behind her when she was apparently unaware, and stabbed her with a senbon needle that seemed to appear out of nowhere. The music heard only moments before stopped abruptly as she dropped to the ground, unconscious. The big man grinned and picked her up, her dark locks falling towards the ground as he slung her over his shoulder like a sack of potatoes. He walked off, whistling a ghastly tune, thinking of the reward money he would get from his boss for her.

"Oi, Chidarake," said another man, this one wiry and tall, said as he jogged to keep pace with the muscular shinobi he had caught up to moments after he hit the kunoichi, "I helped catch her too! I deserve _some _of the money!"

"Hell no!" answered Chidarake, irritated. "You let her get the brat away! Satsujin, I don't care if the kid could walk or not, she was able to get that blasted song finished! She _knew_ we were coming, and it was your job to make sure she didn't! You'll be punished for this, I assure you. I'll tell him myself if I have to, but I'll make sure the boss knows you failed!"

"But Chidarake-" whined Satsujin, sounding like a three-year-old begging for a sweet. The brawny man stopped and turned around, cutting him off. "I don't give a damn! One of us is going to get punished no matter what we do, and it sure as hell ain't going to be me!"

"And what would you be punished for, dear, sweet little Chida-kun?" said a silky voice to his left. A snake slithered out of the undergrowth in the same direction as the voice had come from, twining around a tree and then transforming into a grown woman with long burgundy hair that coiled around her pale body in a set of braids. "I wouldn't want my darling, modest Chida-kun to be hurt for any reason," said the snake-woman, drawing out the last few syllables.

"Ay, don't do that to us, Jouou! You scared me!" complained Satsujin, yet again.

"Oh, the charming Satsu-chan has joined us again!" commented Jouou, her voice dripping with sugar-coated sarcasm.

"Will you all just shut up?" roared Chidarake, annoyed that they were holding him back from the inevitable encounter they would have with their sensei, or their boss, as they were taught to call him. "You're acting like a pair of Genin at a Jounin fight!"

"Aw, but sweetie," murmured Jouou in his ear, "We _are_ Genin, and we will surely see some bloodshed between Jounin in the next few days over this _irritation_ of a kunoichi on your back. Why, all she is is a waste of breathing space that Orochi-"

"Don't say his name!" whispered Satsujin hastily, fear making his already thin face even more narrow. "He can hear you!"

"Don't make up nonsense, Satsu-chan. We'll be back at the hideout soon, we'll get our reward, and, sensei gets his new experimental toy. Nothing could be better. Besides, I'm his head of spies, aren't I? He can't hear us from all the way over here! Stop being paranoid, you sissy."

As the pair bickered behind him, Chidarake sighed and prayed to Kami-sama that what Jouou had said was right, or they'd have hell on their hands soon enough.

0o0o0

Farther away in the forest, the black feline that had carried the young child stopped to sniff the air. It growled, annoyed at the scent of dog in the air, and waited patiently for the source of the smell to come closer. A large brown and white canine bounded out of a bush into the clearing where the panther was located and barked back in the direction it had come, to signal to whoever was following it that it was there. A distant shout of "I'm coming, goddamnit, I'm coming!" alerted the large cat that a creature was near and its fur bristled in anxiety.

A human male with wild hair and red triangles on his cheeks stepped through the shrub that the dog had come leaping out of only seconds before and stopped dead, staring at the panther as though seeing a long-lost friend turned to an enemy.

"Oh, please, Kami-sama, no," said the man, rushing over to the animal and looking at what it carried. "Please, no, please don't be hers."

The panther, surprising the dog and his owner, spoke. "I know who you speak of, boy. I am her summon. She wishes for the cub to be brought to his father," the feline paused, unmoving, before speaking the words that could, and would, break the shinobi's heart.

"They took her."

The man dropped to his knees, tears threatening to spill down his tattooed face, and asked the panther a simple question, one word in and of itself.

"Why?"

It was straightforward inquiry, a single word, unadorned with the elegant language that shinobi know nothing of but foreign delegates are raised in the cradle with; it was effortless to say, yet it took all the effort in the world for the man down on the ground, now sobbing, to get it out of his throat.

"Why, damnit, why? She was all I had! She was all _any_ of us had anymore! If I had only gotten there sooner... Why? Why does Kami-sama insist on doing this to us? Why?" The shinobi roared in fury, curled up into a ball, and his canine companion walked over to him to lick his face, wondering why his strong, unbreakable master was on the ground half-dead from grief.

The feline, too, walked over and sniffed the man. "What is your name?" asked the cat, staring intently at the human and the dog both lying on the ground together.

"Kiba. Kiba Inuzuka," he choked out, "My name's Kiba."

"Then stop acting like a child, Kiba, and don't think of going after her. He wants you to. He wants you all to. He'll kill you, and he'll take Kou and use her for experiments, just as he will her mother. She wanted this, Kiba. She wanted you to be safe. She wanted her child to be safe. So stop being a baby. That's Kou's job, not yours. We must bring her to his father."

Kiba nodded and stood up shakily. He seemed unstable, so his dog allowed him to climb on his back. They followed after the panther and headed in the direction where Kou's father was.

"I just hope we can find him, Akamaru," whispered Kiba to his canine as they padded along after his friend's summon. "That's all we can do. Just hope…"

0o0o0

Pronunciation:

Chidarake- Chi-dah-rah-kay

Satsujin- Sat-sue-gin

Jouou- Jo-oh

Kou- Koh

Kiba- Key-bah

Akamaru- A-kah-mah-roo

Orochimaru- Oh-roe-chi-mah-roo


	2. Chapter 2

**A/N: Konnichiwa minna-san! I hope you all liked the last chapter! This is my longest fic ever! (Besides a Harvest Moon one that I abandoned and deleted because it was crap) And, although it probably seems small, I got more views on this story then on anything I've ever had! Yay! Anyways, enough with my idiotic rambling. Story time! **

**Dark!Naruto. Also, minor Naruto bashing. Okay, not minor. Major. Don't like, don't read.**

**Disclaimer: Nothing is mine. Which kinda sucks. A lot.**

0o0o0

Kiba paced back and forth next to the small campfire he had prepared for himself and baby Kou, as Akamaru and the panther had thick coats of fur and didn't need the heat. The large black cat glanced at the Inuzuka and stood up from his former position of lying down and strutted closer to the flames. As he came nearer, the anxiety on the boy's face become more evident until the panther came to question his thoughts.

"Kiba, what's the matter? You shouldn't be this nervous. Kou is alive, her mother is alive, at least for the time being, and you and I are alive as well. What is there to be worried about?"

"Everything! Everything is going wrong! The village's hope has been kidnapped, her daughter is still too young to speak, let alone sing, and I'm spouting out my feelings to a talking _cat_ that just brought me the worst news that the past century has ever heard besides the time when Konoha was destroyed! How can you expect me to be okay?"

"It's not like dogs are much better," muttered the panther under his breath. Akamaru barked, as if to defy the statement. "And for your information, _human_, I do have a name. You can call me Akai."

Akai walked away to go sit farther from the fire, complaining about the heat, as Kiba quietly mumbled something about stupid animals that think their names can have nothing to do with how they look (1).

Kiba rolled over away from the bright flames and curled his muscled body around the tiny figure of Kou. "It'll be alright," he whispered to the infant, "We'll find her soon. She can't be that far, and…well, we'll find her. Somehow."

As the two humans drifted off to sleep, Akai snorted at the foolish statement that the shinobi had just made. She'd be dead by the time they found her, dead or far worse.

But even as he thought this, the panther felt his gut wrench at the image in his mind. She would be used, experimented on, eaten away at by whatever they put into her to see if her blood could counter the diseases they were creating…

It was horrible. Disgusting. He abhorred the mere mention of it out loud. But he was strangely drawn to it, just as a child is drawn to toys or a dog to a bone. He was an animal-even he could admit that. And being an animal meant he didn't always have a say in things-his diet, his anger, his fear, his irrational want to rip into the fleshy body of a deer and tear it to shreds. He was born for carnage as a beast and a ninja tool, and he would've been a fool to think otherwise. But the summon still wished he could have some sort of shield from it all, from the chaos of the world, the natural disorder of things. Eventually he, too, curled in on himself, his muzzle resting near his flicking tail, and allowed his troubled mind to rest.

0o0o0

Kiba woke with a scream. The child curved into the arch of his stomach immediately started wailing, frightened of things it had no understanding of. Akamaru nuzzled the crying bundle, obviously confused. Kiba sighed, trying to ignore his pounding eardrums, and picked up the sobbing newborn and rocked her back and forth the way he had seen Kou's mother do on the rare occasions he came to visit her.

He'd had a nightmare. That part alone wasn't unusual, but what the dream had been about was. He had hoped never to relive the experience or even hear about it again, but it made his heart heavy to think about it. It was a dream about when he was younger. A teenager, about to be in the prime of his life, a strong shinobi for his village. One of the most powerful, he was a part of the best tracking and assassination group in the whole of the Land of Fire. Before the Land of Fire had been destroyed, that was.

He and his teammates had been sent out on a mission to locate a rogue shinobi and bring him in for questioning. It was only a B ranked mission, nothing serious, and that's why they hadn't expected it. As the team had rounded a corner, they had been ambushed by more than three dozen ninja, all out to kill. They had taken his best friend Shino down first, blocking the holes where his insects roosted with mud and knocking him out. Then they had captured Kiba himself. The last thing he remembered was seeing Hinata furiously spinning in a whirlwind of pressure-point hits and visible blue chakra. Then he had passed out.

When he woke, his surroundings were dark, but he could hear sinister laughter in the other room. Then he heard whimpering to the left of him and a slight buzzing to the right, and he knew that he was near Akamaru and Shino, but then where was Hinata?

His blood boiled when he again heard the snickering from the other room. His enhanced senses had begun to come back, and he noticed that among all of the male chakra signatures in the other room, there was one female. Hinata. She was alive. Barely, but she was. He nudged Shino to see if he was awake. His bugs had already begun work on the ropes binding them, although sluggishly, as if they had been drugged. They probably had. Kiba then turned to Akamaru. His companion was already up and ready. As soon as he heard Shino whisper a muffled "Let's go", Kiba lost all sense of secrecy. He burst into the other room, and the sight that greeted him absolutely disgusted him.

These men were animals. Pigs. Worms. Absolutely revolting. Ghastly, filthy, repulsive, nauseating, horrid, sordid, foul, low, squalid. Kiba ran through all of the words in his mind, but he couldn't find a single one to describe the level to which these men were. He would kill them. He'd kill all of them, numerous though they were. They'd die slow, painful deaths for doing something like this to her.

And they did. All except for one.

The memory of what they had done and what he had done in turn burned in his mind, scorching his thoughts like a hot skewer. He could never forgive himself, and she never had either.

He had almost killed the love of her life, although he was a monster.

And she had wanted him to live. Even after he did those things to her, even after he got her pregnant far too young, even after he ruined her life and her career, she still thought she loved him. Even though Kiba had loved her far more.

And that was something that he never wanted to remember.

0o0o0

**Akai means "red" in Japanese**

**A/N: Well, did anybody figure out who the mystery lady is? Kind of obvious, but if you get it right I'll give you an e-cookie! Hope you enjoyed, morbid though it was. Ciao!**


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